Friday, 28 May 2010

We've seen numerous efforts to let mobile phone users earn cash for performing small tasks, but it wasn't until recently that we had seen an iPhone app dedicated solely to that purpose. Now joining the ranks of CloudCrowd, Fiverr, Samasource and others, Field Agent is a free iPhone app that gives users of the mobile device a directed way to increase their pay.

iPhone users begin by downloading the Field Agent application from the iTunes App Store. They can then search for jobs in their geographical area, complete them and get paid. Most listed jobs are in everyday locations where agents live; examples include collecting retail pricing and display information, event images, photos of items for sale and consumer surveys that can be completed anywhere an iPhone can be used. The Field Agent software uses the iPhone's built-in tools to provide clients with information including agent history, GPS location, time and date stamps, and photo confirmations. Payments can range from USD 3 to USD 8, depending on the job’s degree of difficulty. Clients, in turn, can rate agents for their reliability and accuracy. Field Agent requires iPhone OS 3.1 or later and is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

Field Agent is a joint venture between Arkansas-based Mill Creek Software and NorthStar Partnering Group. It's also another shining example of the recession-friendly crowdsourced labour trend. One more to emulate or try out for yourself!

Tuesday, 25 May 2010

Dutch flower exporter Pieter Hoff often spent nights in his beloved lily fields to monitor them. One evening, he noticed that the first droplets of morning condensation were collecting on the leaves of his lilies well before midnight.

The plants lost heat to the air at night, and the cool surface of the leaves sucked water droplets from the warm, humid air. Nature’s watering system, Hoff thought, is incredibly efficient. So in 2003, he sold his business and began developing a planter that could capture water the same way plants do and foster saplings in the harshest conditions.

Today, one third of the world’s population lives where water is scarce or of poor quality, a number that’s expected to jump to two thirds by 2025. Making matters worse, in some areas deforestation and overfarming have led to eroded soil that can no longer support many crops. Hoff designed his Groasis Waterboxx with this in mind—it’s a plant incubator that’s made from plastic or a biodegradable material and designed to cool faster than the night air, like his lilies. The box is coolest at its top, the part that has the most contact with the open air. Water condenses on the cover and flows down into a small holding tank, where it’s trapped, along with any rainwater. The collected water and the box itself keep the plant and its roots hydrated and protected.

At the same time, a candle-like wick on the bottom of the box slowly drips small doses of the water into the soil and root system underneath, providing enough for the plant’s first year of life but still leaving the roots thirsty enough to grow strong and deep. The box can easily be lifted up off the ground, over the top of the plant, and reused.In 2006 Hoff took 25 Waterboxxes to Morocco’s Sahara desert, and after a year, 88 percent of the trees he treated had green leaves, while 90 percent of those watered weekly (the traditional local method) died under the scorching sun. He is conducting more experiments with 20,000 Waterboxxes in difficult terrains in places like Pakistan and Ecuador this year.

Hoff is hoping to recruit people to buy a few Waterboxxes from his Web site (groasis.com) to see how the invention works in other regions he hasn’t reached. “Everywhere you look, there’s space to plant,” he says. “But I can’t do this alone.”

Wednesday, 19 May 2010

The attraction of cycling as a green, healthy, and cost-saving form of transport is huge for consumers, especially so at a time when the environment and world financial woes dominate the zeitgeist. Businesses doing something a little different for cyclists are a strong bet for success. Here's five we recently spotted:

1. GREEN GOOSE — As part of their package of web services allowing users to track healthy lifestyle achievements, Green Goose's bike-mounted sensors record cycling activity and upload the data over wifi. The company also provides services to help employers encourage cycling to work.

2. E-WERK — The energy generated pushing those pedals has long been tapped to power lights using a dynamo. But why stop there? German manufacturer Busch & Müller sells a dynamo-powered power supply allowing users to charge phones, MP3 players and other mobile devices. E-Werk comes with a selection of connectors including USB.

3. VELOCOMPUTER — Some cyclists may prefer not to fit an assortment of paraphernalia to their bikes, be it for security, aerodynamic or purely aesthetic reasons. VeloComputer is a mobile phone-based alternative to traditional bike computers and uses the accelerometer built in to many modern smartphones.

4. THE HUMBLE VINTAGE — If a cyclist is away from home and hasn't got their bike with them, they may want to rent something with a bit of personality that doesn't clearly signpost them as a tourist. Melbourne-based The Humble Vintage refurbishes classic and vintage cycles as a rental alternative to the ubiquitous MTB.

5. BICYKLO — Aiming to make it easier to find the perfect cycle tour, Bicyklo aggregates thousands of tour offers from hundreds of operators worldwide into a single database, allowing cyclists to search by area, duration and type rather than have to seek out individual operators and investigate what they have on offer.

Friday, 14 May 2010

This smart book will make you think. Academic yet easy to read, it explores how random events shape the world and how human intuition fights that fact. I found this point fascinating. It never occurred to me that our brains naturally want to see patterns and order, and life doesn't necessarily work like that.

It's comforting to think of an orderly world, with everything in its place, running according to plan. It dovetails into our yearning for meaning and control, and the need to feel that we are important. The idea of randomness is frightening. If the world is shaped without conscious decision, it's a pretty chilly prospect.

Author Leonard Mlodinow examines the importance of randomness in diverse situations, including Las Vegas roulette tables, "Let's Make a Deal," the career of Bruce Willis, and the Warsaw ghetto after Hitler invaded Poland. The author does a good job explaining how chance and luck are vital factors in how things turn out.

The cover has a nice touch. On the dust jacket, several die-cut holes reveal letters on the hardback underneath. The letters are the R and D in "Drunkard's," the A in "Walk," the N in "Randomness," the O in "Our" and the M in Mlodinow. These letters are connected by a thin red line. They spell out "RANDOM."

Thursday, 13 May 2010

Composting may be the right thing to do for the environment, but it can be hard to get around the smell and the mess—particularly for urbanites without expansive yards. Much like the Daily Dump in India—which, by the way, looks to be thriving since our 2007 coverage—Compost Cab is a new service about to launch in Washington, DC, that can be called upon to handle all the dirty details.

DC-area consumers begin by signing up online. Once it launches, Compost Cab will then provide them with a standardized bin equipped with a sturdy, compostable bag liner. Each day clients will fill the bin with their organic material, and once a week—on a reliable, fuel-efficient schedule—Compost Cab will pick up the bag, leaving behind only a clean bin with a new liner. The cost is simply USD 8 per week per bin; no long-term commitments are required. Compost Cab's primary composting partner is Engaged Community Offshoots (ECO), a seed-stage urban farm in College Park, Md., that uses finished compost to grow natural, nutritious food for local kids.

At least as interesting is that clients who have been with Compost Cab for nine months or longer can claim some finished soil in return. Specifically, for every 50 pounds of organics the company collects from them, they can receive five pounds of fresh compost and one pound of worm castings in exchange. Those who choose not to claim their share, meanwhile, can ask Compost Cab to donate it on their behalf to ECO. Compost Cab is a production of Agricity LLC, a Washington, DC-based company focused on sustainability.

The average American family produces more than 500 pounds of leftover organic material every year; composting not only keeps that waste out of methane-generating landfills, it also produces nutrient-rich, fertile, natural soil. Looks like another win-win-win—for eco-minded consumers, the environment, and companies like Compost Cab that make it all happen.

Saturday, 8 May 2010

There's no false modesty about it--Fabrice Penot wanted to start a revolution with Le Labo, the fragrance companyhe co-founded in 2006.

How could he not? For starters, he didn't want the small, boutique brand to do any advertising--a major no-no in an industry where Britney Spears makes dozens of in-store appearances to hawk her latest as-seen-on-TV potion.

Then Penot insisted on limiting distribution to his own stores and a handful of exclusive perfume counters, another crazy idea compared with the saturation strategy of fragrance industry giants such as Armani, where Penot worked before hatching his plan.

On top of that, he refused to keep stock on the shelf, instead making each store a kind of chic lab experience: a cool, minimalist space where ingredients are blended together on the spot, poured into plain glass bottles, wrapped in a brown paper package and custom labeled like a science project, with the date, scent and name of the buyer.

"No one believed in the idea," Penot says, echoing the downer vibes so often sent to startups.

And that led to perhaps the most absurd thing of all about Le Labo: Penot and his partner Eddie Roschi went ahead and started the business with almost no outside funding.

Today, just four years later--and a spectacularly lousy four years for luxury products like Penot's--Le Labo has grown into a $4.5 million a year fragrance brand with four stand-alone boutiques worldwide (and four more planned by the end of this year), plus 12 counters inside the world's most exclusive retail enclaves, including Barneys New York and Colette in Paris. Kirsten Dunst is one of many celebrity fans. And Le Labo is a darling of the fashion world, written about in high-end publications including W--enough to make a publicist plotz. If only they had one.

"We don't spend money on marketing," says Penot, again the contrarian to mainstream fragrance companies, where the bulk of the budget goes toward splashy campaigns. "We only spend money on perfume."

"Ridiculous!"You can see why, when Penot and Roschi set out to finagle a round of financing--which Penot thought would be a cakewalk, given his deep industry connections--Le Labo was not an easy sell. In fact, big beauty's execs were the biggest naysayers of them all.

"They told us, ‘OK--this is ridiculous,'" Penot says of his initial meeting with the brass from a major beauty company. Penot and Roschi's four-bottles-a-day sales goal for the first store drew the biggest laughs of all: A bottle of Le Labo--a name that the execs deemed "unpronounceable"--carries a $200 price tag, about double what the major brands charge. "They said, ‘Just send us a résumé. We're gonna find you a job.'"

That was the last thing they wanted. Penot had been busy creating big-budget blockbusters during a six-year stint as a perfume developer at Armani Fragrances, and Le Labo was his chance to make the indie label of his dreams. (Just for the record, it's pronounced luh LA'-bo and means "the lab" in French.) Roschi, his best friend and fellow Armani Fragrances alum, was also becoming disillusioned with the corporate life and the commoditization of perfume. But more importantly, Penot also believed that there was a individualistic void in the mass-produced fragrance market, which, according to research group NPD, accounts for $25 billion to $30 billion in sales each year.

Though they needed cash, after that "ridiculous" experience--and many others like it--Penot and Roschi agreed: No loans for them.

So Penot moved out of his fancy downtown Manhattan digs and shacked up with Roschi in a one-bedroom, sixth-floor walk-up, where he spent the next 18 months sleeping on the sofa. Each kicked in about $100,000, and in the end, four close friends contributed roughly $30,000 (one of them used his work bonus; another, Penot later found out, sold his car). The money allowed Penot to hire top perfumers and buy expensive, pure ingredients, but it was still a far cry from the millions he had hoped to score from formal investors.

"Fortunately, nobody trusted us," Penot says with a chuckle. "We realized that the energy we were spending in trying to convince people to invest could have been spent in creation and trying to do things cheaply. Because if someone had given us $2 million to create Le Labo, we would have spent it."

The duo learned an early lesson in doing things on the cheap when it came time to build their first store, in the hip Nolita neighborhood of Manhattan. Unable to afford the $200,000 quoted by architects, Penot instead hired a general contractor to handle the permits and he and Roschi did most of the construction themselves. They actually started without a visual idea of what the store would look like, confident that their taste level would allow the store to "design itself." Plainly put, Penot and Roschi knew what they wanted their brand to look like and trusted themselves to make it happen however they could.

The result is a light-filled space with raw wood floors, an almost pharmaceutical perfume counter and austere surfaces interrupted by quiet bursts of sensuality--a silver, swag-patterned wall or soft glass lanterns.

In February, Le Labo opened its fourth store, in London. Like the others--in L.A., Tokyo and Manhattan--it was built without an architect, even though the pair can now afford one.

To generate cash flow while developing their business, Penot and Roschi again relied on industry connections. Only this time, they began consulting for fragrance brands. They still consult today and have created scents for stylish clients such as the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York, which sells a fragrance called Cade 26 that includes smoky notes inspired by the lobby fireplace.

That initial cash flow and lack of debt allowed the brand to build from profit, not fear, from Day One. And even today, Penot keeps his company "too small to fail." Save for its retail stores, Le Labo has no corporate offices. Instead, the four employees work remotely from laptops while about 20 others man the stores.

"We keep the costs of operations so low that it allows us to move the boat very quickly if the current is moving," Penot says.

Le Labo's expansion strategy, naturally, is as unorthodox as the rest of the business. "We open new stores only when the cash is in the bank. We only spend money when we have it." Penot says. Sounds like every American's "duh" moment over the last decade.

Pure Creativity"The world doesn't need rational or reasonable products--the world is full of reasonable products and reasonable businesses," Penot says of what he considers the secret to his business' success. "It was just a business model with your own point of sale with an expensive price and an environment and aesthetic that wasn't meeting all the landmarks of the usual perfume business model. It was not reasonable for anyone. And that's why it makes sense."

And, of course, the scents had to be mind-blowing too. Rose 31, the brand's bestseller, is a spicy floral that accomplishes another feat: It is a rose perfume that is worn by men as well as women. By blending the sweet rose with the "dirty" scent of synthetic ambergris, Le Labo created "a completely contemporary perfume," The New York Times perfume critic Chandler Burr wrote. "Elegant yet something you smell between the sheets."

Indeed, Penot's philosophy of perfumery is to develop something that deeply affects the wearer. "When it brings the feeling of being special, and a certain idea of elegance and an extra confidence," he says, "the magic happens."

Perhaps Penot's least rational move was opening a store in Tokyo in 2008, despite a slight snag: The Japanese aren't big fans of perfume. But he calls that notion a self-fulfilling prophecy. "We realized that when you take the time to teach them that perfume can be an art and it's not only products in a bottle, they connect with that. Now a lot of perfume brands are opening doors over there, just because they realize there is a market."

Their creative approach is apparent, too, in the way Le Labo regularly develops limited-edition scents, exclusive to the cities where they are sold. So far, they have captured the floral-musky edge of Los Angeles, the peppery-Asian side of London, New York's smoky underbelly and even a clean, vanilla distillation of Dallas. The perfumes cost as much as twice that of the other products in the 12-scent lineup, which run $50 to $200. The exclusive city scents only add to the cachet that Penot initially set out to capture. And capture it he did.

"We had a lot of luck," he says of the immense buzz surrounding the brand. Part of that luck again falls to connections--the fragrance industry vets knew Le Labo deserved quiet mention. After W magazine's full-page spread a mere three months after the launch, The New York Times came calling. Then Barneys.

"In our business plan we wanted to go to Barneys two years after we opened," Penot says. "They came to us after four months."

And in case you're wondering, the Nolita store met the four-bottle-a-day goal. In fact, it exceeded it--by 66.

Wednesday, 5 May 2010

The previous decade saw its share of disasters and near misses: Y2K, 9/11, the South Asian tsunami, the Northeast Blackout of 2003, Hurricane Katrina. And if the forces of terrorists, tectonics and power grids weren't enough, the global economic meltdown sealed 2000s' fate as one of the most disaster-prone decades in recent memory.

The result, according to Gerald Celente, director of the Kingston, N.Y.-based Trends Research Institute, is the rise of neo-survivalism. Neo-survivalists, also known as "preppers,"prepare for the worst, be it environmental catastrophe, war, famine, disease or various other scourges. Think Lost meets Robinson Crusoe meets The Day After Tomorrow.

A recent hash of books and movies predicting teotwawki — "the end of the world as we know it,"in survivalist shorthand — give cultural credence to the trend. American novelist Cormac McCarthy's best-selling book, The Road, and the movie of the same name tell the story of a man and his son fighting for survival after an apocalyptic event destroys modern society, while disaster flick 2012 focuses on the end of the Mayan calendar.

But don't let the bad news depress you; where there is potential crisis, there is opportunity, says Celente: "As the neo-survivalism trend grows, the survival business will boom."

The trend is picking up extra steam south of the border, where natural disasters such as hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, earthquakes and forest fires in California and twisters through the Midwest have been particularly prevalent. The American Red Cross had 160,000 more volunteers in 2009 than it had in 2008 — a dramatic rebound from the drop of 82,000 from 2007 to 2008.

Jim Rawls, the Moyie Springs, Idaho-based editor of SurvivalBlog.com, saw his readership double in the past 12 months to 220,000 unique visitors each week. What's more, his readership has gone mainstream. When he launched in 2005, readership surveys suggested mainly conservative Christians were visiting his site; today, surveys show his average reader is just as likely to eschew the Bible and drive a Prius. "This trend crosses the spectrum,"says Rawls, a former army intelligence officer.

Rawls points out that although the market for emergency-preparedness kits is filling up, there are still lots of opportunities in the sector. For example, "People are completely clueless about long-term food storage,"he says. Companies that can provide "survival foods,"such as nitrogen-packed edibles with long shelf lives, could tap into this trend, Rawls says, especially if they can also educate their customers about how to store them.

Michael Baruch, president of American Family Safety Inc., a Toronto-based survival-kit distributor, recommends focusing on school boards, governments and businesses. "They've been the biggest drivers in our business,"says Baruch, who founded his company in 2003 following the blackout that left much of Ontario and a chunk of the U.S. without power.

And for organizations, disaster expertise is in short supply, says Adrian Gordon, president and CEO of the Burlington, Ont.-based Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness. "Awareness levels about the need for preparedness have gone up, but people still aren't sure where to begin,"he says, adding that the need for expertise is especially great among smaller companies that can't afford to hire a major management consultancy to develop a preparedness plan. Gordon cites a recent American Express Small Business Monitor report, in which 58% of the 500 businesses surveyed said they were not prepared for an emergency. "They know it'sneeded, but need help getting it done."

Chuck Wright, director of the Toronto-based World Conference on Disaster Management, says there are also opportunities for firms that bring personal and organizational preparedness together. More and more of the CEOs who attend the annual conference are looking for personal preparedness plans for their employees, he says.

Rather than the more common company-wide preparedness plans — which create a blueprint for how companies should deal with server breakdowns, ammonia leaks, power outages and the like — personal plans are tailored to individual employees and lay out how they'll carry out their job function in the event of a disaster. Wright says such plans address personal concerns such as having adequate food and water, and care for children.

Another opportunity, according to Celente, is to create schools and courses that provide training in self-defense and close combat. Scary? Perhaps. But when it comes to teotwawki, any preparation is better than none.